<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!--
                                                                                     
 h       t     t                ::       /     /                     t             / 
 h       t     t                ::      //    //                     t            // 
 h     ttttt ttttt ppppp sssss         //    //  y   y       sssss ttttt         //  
 hhhh    t     t   p   p s            //    //   y   y       s       t          //   
 h  hh   t     t   ppppp sssss       //    //    yyyyy       sssss   t         //    
 h   h   t     t   p         s  ::   /     /         y  ..       s   t    ..   /     
 h   h   t     t   p     sssss  ::   /     /     yyyyy  ..   sssss   t    ..   /     
                                                                                     
	<https://y.st./>
	Copyright © 2016-2017 Alex Yst <mailto:copyright@y.st>

	This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
	it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
	the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
	(at your option) any later version.

	This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
	but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
	MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
	GNU General Public License for more details.

	You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
	along with this program. If not, see <https://www.gnu.org./licenses/>.
-->
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
	<head>
		<base href="https://y.st./en/a/about.xhtml"/>
		<title>About me &lt;https://y.st./en/a/about.xhtml&gt;</title>
		<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/link/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./icon.png"/>
		<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/link/main.css"/>
		<script type="text/javascript" src="/script/javascript.js"/>
		<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width"/>
	</head>
	<body>
<nav>
	<p>
		<a href="/en/coursework/">Coursework</a> |
		<a href="/en/take-down/">Take-down requests</a> |
		<a href="/en/">Home</a> |
		<a href="/en/a/about.xhtml">About</a> |
		<a href="/en/a/contact.xhtml">Contact</a> |
		<a href="/a/canary.txt">Canary</a> |
		<a href="/en/URI_research/"><abbr title="Uniform Resource Identifier">URI</abbr> research</a> |
		<a href="/en/opinion/">Opinions</a> |
		<a href="/en/law/">Law</a> |
		<a href="/en/recipe/">Recipes</a> |
		<a href="/en/a/links.xhtml">Links</a> |
		<a href="/en/a/about.xhtml.asc">{this page}.asc</a>
	</p>
	<hr/>
</nav>
		<header>
			<h1>About me</h1>
			<p>Who is Yst?</p>
		</header>
<img class="framed-centred-image" src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./selfie.jpg" width="640" height="480" alt="My face"/>
<p>
	Hello! My name is Alex Yst (pronounced &quot;ist&quot; like the end of the word &quot;catal<strong>yst</strong>&quot;), and this is my home on the Web.
	I&apos;m a bit too busy to get everything done on this website as I&apos;d like to, so please bear with me.
	Development here is very slow.
	This website is going in <strong>no particular direction</strong>, and simply contains whatever I happen to want to make available on the Web.
</p>
<p>
	As for myself, I&apos;m a computer science student.
	However, due to threats from the school and accompanying censorship demands, you won&apos;t hear much about my studies until 2024-01-01.
	I&apos;m very much a supporter of free software and free culture, and believe the two to be highly intertwined.
	I don&apos;t settle for garbage licenses such as the <abbr title="GNU &quot;Free&quot; Documentation License">GFDL</abbr>, <abbr title="Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial">CC BY-NC</abbr>, or <abbr title="Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives">CC BY-ND</abbr>, regardless of the nature of the item being licensed.
	I used to be a supporter of the <abbr title="Free Software Foundation">FSF</abbr> until I learned that they actively promote the use on nonfree licensing, especially for non-software works based on opinion.
	I use Debian on my laptop and server, and Replicant on my mobile device.
</p>
<p>
	I&apos;m an agendered bisexual; that means I don&apos;t feel masculine or feminine, and I can pair with someone of any gender or sex.
	If you don&apos;t know the difference between sex and gender, that statement might not make much sense to you; sex is a description of what&apos;s between your legs, while gender is a description of what&apos;s in your mind.
	I&apos;m looking for a monogamous love interest, but I&apos;m currently single.
</p>
<p>
	If you&apos;re visiting my website, please check on my <a href="/a/canary.txt">canary</a>.
	It acts as a safety mechanism to know if I have been legally required to withhold information.
	If my canary hasn&apos;t chirped in a while, <strong>*please*</strong> alert anyone you feel is relevant to the fact that I need help.
	My <abbr title="Pretty Good Privacy">PGP</abbr> key <abbr title="identification">ID</abbr> is <code>0xE7464A03</code> and my <abbr title="Pretty Good Privacy">PGP</abbr> fingerprint is <code>D135 B061 DBED 690B 479F E2E3 7D83 E1E5 E746 4A03</code>.
</p>
<h2>Why <code>y.st.</code>?</h2>
<p>
	I&apos;d wanted a short domain name for years, but my country&apos;s registry doesn&apos;t allow short domains to be registered.
	I gave up for the time being.
	As I grew to realise how terrible my country is (which was completely unrelated to domain-registration policies of the registry), I became less intent on using my own country&apos;s <abbr title="country code top-level domain">ccTLD</abbr> if it wasn&apos;t going to meet my needs.
	I started looking at the registries of other countries, trying to find one that allowed short domains to be registered even by outsiders.
	I found one domain had expired at a registry I liked.
	I think the domain was <code>r.dm.</code>, but I don&apos;t recall for sure.
	I took excellent notes a the time, but those notes were lost due to later hard drive failure.
	The <code>dm.</code> registry has an interesting policy of registering your chosen second-level name along with three third-level names, each under a specific second-level name.
	I thought that might be fun to have.
	All short names were registered, but that one name had expired.
	It still remained in the database though, preventing registration by another party.
	I wrote to the registry asking about it.
	They never responded.
	So that&apos;s why I&apos;m not at <code>r.dm.</code>.
</p>
<p>
	When they didn&apos;t respond right away, I started sending letters to other registries.
	Most of them didn&apos;t respond in a timely manner, though one responded long after it was too late to get a sale from me.
	I think that was the <code>mp.</code> registry, but again, I don&apos;t quite recall.
	There was one registry that contacted me back almost right away though: the <code>st.</code> registry.
	I&apos;d contacted them because their website said short names were available, but that you had to contact them to get any information on how to register one and what their prices were.
	I didn&apos;t take them up on their offer right away, and planned to make the purchase on the first of the month if their offer was the best.
	However, my hard drive died on me before that could happen.
	It took me several days to get back into my email account, having lost my password database.
	I had to first convince my current domain registry that I was me so they&apos;d let me in, then use my access to my old domain to convince my email service provider that I was me.
	No other registry had responded, so I had one offer.
	I wrote back to the registry, but they didn&apos;t respond either.
	I think the email was tagged with a ticket number which had expired, so their system threw out my letter.
	I wrote a new email, formatting it not as a reply, and they responded right away again.
	This mess delayed my registration, which is why my domain&apos;s registration date is the seventh of the month, and not the first.
</p>
<p>
	They had eight domain names available: <code>0.st.</code>, <code>f.st.</code>, <code>h.st.</code>, <code>n.st.</code>, <code>q.st.</code>, <code>v.st.</code>, <code>y.st.</code>, and <code>z.st.</code>.
	I didn&apos;t want a digit as my name.
	There were just too many problems I&apos;d had in the past with using a digit-based domain.
	I wasn&apos;t sure what letter to choose at first, but after a bit, I realised there was only one vowel in the bunch: y.
	If I was to use my domain as a handle for myself as I&apos;d done in the past, <code>y.st.</code> would be my best option.
	It was also the most viable for domain hacks.
	I purchased that domain, then set about figuring out how to pronounce &quot;yst&quot;.
	Being that &quot;y&quot; was the vowel, it couldn&apos;t be used to make the sound it does in words such as &quot;yield&quot;.
	That&apos;s its consonant sound.
	I ended up going with the sound the three letters make in words such as &quot;cr<strong>yst</strong>al&quot; and &quot;catal<code>yst</code>&quot;, as there was a clear precedent for that combination of letters being pronounced that way.
</p>
		<hr/>
		<p>
			Copyright © 2016-2017 Alex Yst;
			You may modify and/or redistribute this document under the terms of the <a rel="license" href="/license/gpl-3.0-standalone.xhtml"><abbr title="GNU&apos;s Not Unix">GNU</abbr> <abbr title="General Public License version Three or later">GPLv3+</abbr></a>.
			If for some reason you would prefer to modify and/or distribute this document under other free copyleft terms, please ask me via email.
			My address is in the source comments near the top of this document.
			This license also applies to embedded content such as images.
			For more information on that, see <a href="/en/a/licensing.xhtml">licensing</a>.
		</p>
		<p>
			<abbr title="World Wide Web Consortium">W3C</abbr> standards are important.
			This document conforms to the <a href="https://validator.w3.org./nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fy.st.%2Fen%2Fa%2Fabout.xhtml"><abbr title="Extensible Hypertext Markup Language">XHTML</abbr> 5.2</a> specification and uses style sheets that conform to the <a href="http://jigsaw.w3.org./css-validator/validator?uri=https%3A%2F%2Fy.st.%2Fen%2Fa%2Fabout.xhtml"><abbr title="Cascading Style Sheets">CSS</abbr>3</a> specification.
		</p>
	</body>
</html>

